Low memory laptop
 

Hi there. I'm trying to install Debian stable on an old laptop with 8mb of RAM. When I boot from the rescue disk and insert the root disk, I am told that I am out of memory with no killable processes.

I installed Slackware on it previously with a bunch of floppies. For Debian, however, I'd prefer to install over the network. With Slack, I made about 10mb of swap space on hda3. Is there any way I could enable that to use while booting, or should I make it bigger? Is there any way I can install Debian with 8mb RAM?

I don't know anything about Debian. If you're installing from a live CD (such as Gentoo, for instance), you can easily enable swap. You would first create the primary partition with fdisk, then change its type to 82, then exit fdisk, and go:Good luck buddy. I think that 8MB of RAM just isn't gonna cut it with current distros. 64MB is what you need in order to have a reasonably well functioning Linux or BSD system, I would think. But, I may be wrong...

I'm installing from floppies; this laptop doesn't have a CD drive. Is there a boot parameter I can pass to enable the swap?

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/BootPrompt-HOWTO-3.html#ss3.3

Doesn't really explain anything, but it's all I could find in the few minutes I have.

I guess my question is either 1) can I install with less than the recommended amount, or 2) can I initialize swap space to help ease the memory burden?